English

Ten Theses on Black Hole Entropy

High Energy Physics - Theory 2011-10-20 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

I present a viewpoint on black hole thermodynamics according to which the entropy: derives from horizon "degrees of freedom"; is finite because the deep structure of spacetime is discrete; is "objective" thanks to the distinguished coarse graining provided by the horizon; and obeys the second law of thermodynamics precisely because the effective dynamics of the exterior region is not unitary.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0504037,
  title  = {Ten Theses on Black Hole Entropy},
  author = {Rafael D. Sorkin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0504037},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

plainTeX, 14 pages, no figures. several typos corrected. Most current version is available at http://www.pitp.ca/personal/rsorkin/some.papers/118.ten.theses.pdf (or wherever my home-page may be)

R2 v1 2026-07-22T15:29:25.735Z